At the world premiere in New York in December 2002, Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times that in Six Dances "the influence of Keith Jarrett, Steve Reich, and Prokofiev mingle with surprising naturalness."
Commissioned by Speculum Musicae
Program Note by John McCaughey:
The piano work of Andrew Byrne forms a contemporary sounding-board from an Australian composer of a younger generation, whose primary interest is also in the play of polyrhythmic musical ideas. Born in Melbourne in 1966, he studied at La Trobe and at Columbia University in New York, where he currently lives. His activities there have included organising concerts of various kinds with both local and Australian composers. The intense rhythmic focus of his own music gravitates more towards the informal ‘downtown’ performance environment than the traditional concert hall. The piece Six Dances, however, was commissioned for the formal concert series of the contemporary New York group Speculum Musicae, and premiered at Merkin Hall by the pianist Stephen Gosling in December 2002 (dances 1, 2, 3 and 5). The first complete performance was given by Michael Kieran Harvey in Perth last year.
Based entirely on overlays of a single motive from West African drumming, the Six Dances make formidable rhythmic demands on the pianist while calling for the variety of sound that a live player can make across reiterating patterns. “These pieces come from a larger piano cycle called Vanishing Points, in which I am concerned with the idea of telescoping time, creating music that relentlessly drives to the climax – the vanishing point on the ‘musical horizon’. To that end I have harnessed some of the energy inherent in polyrhythmic techniques. Sparks fly when dissimilar rhythmic cells are superimposed.” Within the dense post-minimalist textures, each piece establishes a distinctive character of keyboard register and musical unfolding. They are performed in succession without a break.
--c. 2004 Astra Chamber Music Society
MP3s
Dance No.1 (mp3 excerpt 463k)
Dance No.3 (mp3 excerpt 418k)
Dance No.5 (mp3 excerpt 447k)
Stephen Gosling, piano; recorded at Merkin Concert Hall, December 2002